A Heterogeneous Graph Convolution Based Method for Short-Term OD Flow Completion and Prediction in a Metro System

Short-term OD flow (i.e. the number of passenger traveling between stations) prediction is crucial to traffic management in metro systems. The delayed effect in latest complete OD flow collection and complex spatiotemporal correlations of OD flows in high dimension make it challengeable to predict short-term OD flow. Existing methods need to be improved due to not fully utilizing the real-time passenger mobility data and not sufficiently modeling the implicit correlation of the mobility patterns between stations. In this paper, we propose a Completion based Adaptive Heterogeneous Graph Convolution Spatiotemporal Predictor. The novelty is mainly reflected in two aspects. The first is to model real-time mobility evolution by establishing the implicit correlation between observed OD flows and the prediction target OD flows in high dimension based on a key data-driven insight: the destination distributions of the passengers departing from a station are correlated with other stations sharing similar attributes (e.g. geographical location, region function). The second is to complete the latest incomplete OD flows by estimating the destination distribution of unfinished trips through considering the real-time mobility evolution and the time cost between stations, which is the base of time series prediction and can improve the model’s dynamic adaptability. Extensive experiments on two real world metro datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model over other competitors with the biggest model performance improvement being nearly 4%. In addition, the data complete framework we propose can be integrated into other models to improve their performance up to 2.1%.